Is Bibi Netanyahu Just Another Racist "Birther"?

Is Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu a Birther?

Who does Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu think he is -- arranging to speak before Congress first without the President's knowledge and then without his imprimatur?  Oh, but wait.  I've seen such brazen arrogance before.  In fact, he exhibits the same racist racist swagger as the leader of the Birther movement.  You do remember, Orly Taitz.    She is the Russian-born Israeli, who can barely speak English.  But that impediment did not diminish her sense of "white skin privilege" in coming to America and launching a movement aimed at forcing President Obama out of office.  The Birthers claim that his American birth certificate is forged and that he is actually Kenyan.

I haven't yet heard the Israeli Prime Minister raise any issues yet about President Obama's birth certificate.  But I wouldn't be surprised if he did.   Netanyahu's brazen efforts to thumb his nose at diplomatic protocol and shame or undermine the first African-American President of the United States carries the same foul smell as Orly Taitz's business.

If you think that I'm imagining things, note an article in last year's Israeli newspaper Haaretz, criticizing their own prime minister for having the affrontery to call the U.S. President "un-American."

You want to give Benjamin Netanyahu the benefit of the doubt. Nonetheless, you have to wonder. You can say a lot of things about Netanyahu: Stupid isn’t one of them. So how could have gone down the route of declaring White House criticism of his government’s moves in East Jerusalem “un-American”? How could he have ignored the multiple numerous alarm bells and whistles that should have warned him to think twice and even thrice before taking this road? How could he have exposed himself to the kind of withering reaction issued by the White House yesterday, summed it up in one loaded little word: “odd.”  In other words - what was he thinking?

It’s not only Netanyahu’s presumptuousness in appointing himself the arbiter of what “reflects American values” and what doesn’t. . . And it’s not only that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of modern U.S. politics – or access to Google - would know that “un-American” is a concept uniquely associated in the American psyche with Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on un-American Activities (HUAC). That anyone trying to impugn a White House for “not reflecting American values” immediately aligns himself with the worst political muckrakers in American history. 

I'm sure Taitz and Netanyahu do not represent the attitudes of all Israelis.  But given the fact that the country has a serious race problem with its treatment of the "Palestinians,"  Netanyahu is not doing a convincing job of proving that he can respect non-Europeans, even if one just so happens to head the only country that is keeping his little nation financially afloat.  Racism is self-defeating and most assuredly counter-productive in a leader of Netanyahu's stature. Perhaps he'll just have to find that out the hard way.

RELATED POST:  Netanyahu's Problem: The Cognitive Challenge of Hating Arabs without Hating America's Black President